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MARCH 2019

Why move from Altium to Mentor

Electronic Systems Design Challenges

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Do you need more than Altium? Organizations designing multiple complex electronic products with teams of engineers quickly outgrow a single-user focused PCB design solution, they need design team focused capabilities, where a team can concurrently design together, even collaborate with other teams/partners or even customers. Unfortunately with Altium this is left to the organizations design team(s), which for most Altium users is not something they have the time, resources or inclination to undertake. Most enterprise companies developing electronic products require much more than just single engineer focused schematic driven design rules based PCB layout.

Products are getting smarter, connected and developing intelligence.

Product complexity is outpacing legacy development where silos, individual engineers and manual processes dominate

Bringing more complex products to market faster requires more seamless integration of electronic hardware, software, wiring, and mechanical infrastructure.

Yet teams—mechanical design, electrical, software and system engineering, and manufacturing—often lack cohesion and visibility while their disparate, siloed tools

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slow productivity. And an increasing reliance on distributed teams requires that collaboration issues get identified and resolved much earlier.

Organizations struggle with common challenges, including:

Poor integration of electronics with mechanical across product development and manufacturing

Inefficient design processes, data incompatibilities, and the need for extensive manual intervention

Heavy dependence on physical prototyping

Many organizations design products that use DDRx memory, high-speed serial interfaces requiring SI/PI analysis and modeling. If you are using Altium you will have to add-on 3rd party solutions, but then who is responsible for the integration? Will the results be trustworthy? Are the software revisions compatible? But SI/PI and efficient, effective and stable power delivery are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to enterprise level electronic product design. What if your designs have RF circuitry/content? Do your products contain more than one PCB, connected with cables/harnesses? Are your designs large and complex, would you like to use multiple concurrent designers, both during schematic capture as well as PCB layout to reduce your design cycles? Do you reuse design IP across projects, team’s even divisions? How is that done today? How much time do you spend or anticipate spending trying to get data in and out of multi-vendor disparate design flow, and how often will things get out of sync and/or break?

Organizations with siloed engineering groups using collections of point tools reported the following when surveyed:

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Without a complete end-to-end digitally integrated solution you are going to end up with siloed data, siloed teams with at best back end 3rd party verification and

simulation. This is likely to result in you regularly building physical prototypes that results in ECO’s and design spins. This is a sure path to missing your business objectives and budgets

In fact Altium users engaged in enterprise level electronics product design noted the

following results after designing with Mentor:

DESIGNING ENTERPRISE LEVEL ELECTRONICS WITH ALTIUM

10% increased needed for design team headcount

Increased cost of end-product product caused by need to add rule of thumb

safety margins to the design (2 more layers for example)

20% design cycle increase for mid-size designs

50% design cycle increase for large designs

1-1.5 more design spins on average

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MENTOR AND SIEMENS THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR YOU

Mentor & Siemens are committed to complete electronic system design, not just PCB

design. Mentor has been the market leader delivering solutions beyond just the core

design tools for more than 30 years, providing a complete engineering environment for

design, simulation, verification and manufacturing. This complete digitally integrated

environment was created by more than 400 developers in a worldwide engineering

environment through Investments of over $1.5B in R&D in the last decade.

Mentor is respected as the market and innovation leader in design and simulation

solutions with the highest in customer support and satisfaction.

Mentor is also part of Siemens, the most respected engineering company in the

industry with more than 100 years of tradition in electrical engineering.

Siemens is pioneering the industry through a digitalization strategy, delivering a

complete digital thread from product ideation over multi-domain implementation

through manufacturing and service life.